Rhea Myers

Category: Uncategorized

  • Comments Are Currently Broken

    Email comments to rob at rheaplex dot org and I’ll add them manually for the moment.
    Yes, this is fail. I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

  • Quantitative Aesthetics – Films Are Getting Worse

    starwars.png

    “If you look at the movies coming out of Hollywood these days, it
    seems obvious that they’re getting worse. Cynics have gone as far as to
    proclaim the death of storytelling.


    Movie studios, they say, are taking the easy way out: recycling old ideas that are a sure bet to attract audiences, regardless of quality. Comic book sequels for the geeks. Twilight adaptations for the teenage girls.


    We process a lot of movie data here at Moki.tv, so we wondered whether this trend would be observable.


    We looked at the 20 most popular movies each year, for the past 20 years.
    The key, we think, is to look for movies that some love and some hate,
    which is the likely profile of a bad movie that’s “safely” manufactured
    for an existing fanbase. In other words, movies that are polarizing.”

    http://moki.tv/blog/visual-evidence-movies-are-getting-worse

  • Remember We Said No Future?

    When I was a child, outdated visions of the future seemed comical.

    Now I think it’s having a vision of the future that would seem comical to a child. The future will be like the present only more so. This isn’t the end of history, only the end of the future. “The cultural smog of the internet” is a product of (and a producer of) this causal and aesthetic flatland.

    William Gibson groks this, although I can’t find the quote just now. Damn. Knowledge clearly isn’t flat enough yet.

    (The title is a quote from the ageing punk character Blank Reg in “Max Headroom” – “Remember we said ‘no future’? Well, this is it…”)

  • Quantitative Aesthetics

    Seeing colours with an iPhone app:

    http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2010/09/hearing-colours.html

    The quantitative aesthetics of an online t-shirt seller:

    http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/09/design-secrets-of-threadless-com/

    Illustration Art on quantitative aesthetics:

    http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2010/09/love-of-art-expressed-in-binary-code.html

    An objectively beautiful (sic) face identification grid, from the above article:

    http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm

  • Quantitative Aesthetics

    http://flowingdata.com/2010/06/28/do-movie-sequels-live-up-to-their-originals/

    Do movie sequels live up to the originals? Testing the diminishing returns theory using scores from an online review website.

    This is a great example of the kind of meta-analysis that computers and large datasets enable.

    http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/2010/07/jennifer-dalton-flag-art-foundation.html

    Jennifer Dalton’s show at FLAG Art Foundation analyses print and online media to depict the social forms that are hidden in the information that they present.

    I can’t get to New York to see the show but it sounds like excellent QA art.

  • The Supernaturalism of Qualia

    Qualia are experiential properties that you cannot reduce further or explain in terms of anything else. The colour red for example. Red cannot be broken down to sklee, flurb and mwow. Nor can it be explained in terms of wum or arnun. Because of this we cannot know whether anyone else experiences the colour red the same as we do. The stability of relationships between colours isn’t a problem for the idea of qualia as something un-communicable. If what you experience as green I experience as orange, we still experience the same colour relationships and apply the name ‘blue’ to their subject when discussing them publicly.

    Qualia may simply be like Lisp ‘symbols’, names at some effectively random point in memory used to refer stably to a concept. There is nothing supernatural here, but there is a limit on what we can usefully or interestingly describe. I don’t find qualia a barrier to either naturalism or AI. That people experience things differently doesn’t invalidate experience or unreal it. If we all experienced the same individuality that would be a problem…

  • Cultures Of Scale

    I call it “the cultural smog of the Internet”. If you want just about any novel or album or film ever produced you can find it in a matter of seconds or hours. The focus of high culture that restricted culture to a canon, and the amnesia of mass culture that replaced bands and TV shows every couple of years, has given way to a flat or post-historical cultural simultaneity even as time has started to flow again after the brief post-cold-war fantasy of “the end of history”.

    Ease of consumption has been accompanied by a dropping of the barriers to production to an almost negligible level in western culture. Anyone can play guitar, but absolutely everyone can play a sample of someone else playing guitar in a mash-up or comment on it in a blog. This is that democracy you were always talking about, the world of everyone being an artist. Be careful what you wish for.
    In the past, the cultural canon was more than most people could hope to read or hear (or see) in their lifetime. Now it’s much, much less. Culture approaches The Condition Of Muzak, of the unceasing BGM (background music) of anime. If we can choose an almost random subset of an almost infinite set of cultural works as our personal canon, how can we speak to others? How can we avoid private-language-like private culture? How can we cheat solipsism?
    “This week is Killers week” said one of the kids sitting a few seats away from me on the railway station a few years ago. Popular culture, mass culture, was always supply-side and not only required but produced a kind of cultural amnesia and lack of purchase. That’s why the fifties are back once a decade, even if we call them the sixties because that’s when they were truly commodified.
    When the culture one may encounter is effectively random, the human may be emphasized rather than undermined. One’s taste, one’s ability not to react but to engage and conceptualise, becomes key and becomes strengthened. When culture is contingent people are not.
    Cultures of scale are the harmonic, set-based, expertise-based-on-exposure-to-many-works-rather-than-a-few, emergent taste and aesthetic products of individual human subjects that only breathing the cultural smog of the internet can produce. We haven’t even begun to guess at them. But rather than retreating into the reactionary defeatism of artificial canons or into the managerialism-that-protests-too-much of semiotic analysis or into the complicit mass-media surfing of cool hunting we should meet cultures of scale and their subjects head on as aesthetics, as valid territory for the history and theory and philosophy of art.
    Just not Girl Talk.Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

  • Notes Towards Free Culture

    Critique of the ICC’s report on the digital economy in Europe

    US spooks plotted to destroy Wikileaks

    Entertainment industry sours on term “pirate” — too sexy

    Spotify: Make Money with Analogue Scarcity

    New ACTA leak: It’s a screwjob for the world’s poor countries

    Child-abuse survivors oppose EU censorwall

    How Internet censorship harms schools

    Myths and realities about job losses in Europe due to illegal downloads

    An amazing post about how real artists see the opportunities of the Internet and the threat of overly-expansive copyright

  • Various Links

    Werewolves in Music

    New UK edition of “Lonely Werewolf Girl” in shops now

    Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first

    More on the Synthetic Aesthetics residencies

    Hacker Conference Calls for Projects and Tech Art

    (Link to) The Economics of (Art) Fakes

    Lady Gaga – a neccessarily empty posthuman sign

    K-Punk didn’t like Burton’s Alice (and I agree with them about RTD’s Who)

  • SaaS – Why Isn’t Wikipedia The Same As Google Docs?

    Richard Stallman’s new essay on Software as a Service (SaaS) is quite explicit about why a group of friends or colleagues collaborating to write an article on Google Docs, which is SaaS by Stallman’s definition, is different from them collaborating to write the same article on Wikipedia, which is not SaaS despite providing very similar collaborative text editing functionality?
    “Using a joint project’s servers isn’t SaaS because the computing you do in this way isn’t yours personally. For instance, if you edit pages on Wikipedia, you are not doing your own computing; rather, you are collaborating in Wikipedia’s computing.”
    The difference between Google Docs and Wikipedia is not a matter of technological or legal form, although the difference is reflected in those forms. The difference is social. With Wikipedia you are volunteering your labour on Wikipedia’s servers to help the Wikipedia project achieve their ends within society. With Google Docs you are trying to achieve your own ends within society by using computing resoures that Google control and can deny to you or use against you.
    The key question is the one that the title of Stallman’s essay poses – who does the server serve; the people who access it over the internet, or the people who run the software on their server? To put it another way; whose ends are being realised using the software? Where people wish to use software as a tool to achieve their own ends, they must be free to do so. Where people wish to volunteer their labour to a project to achieve someone else’s ends by accessing that person’s software, that is a (slightly) different matter.
    Whether something is Software as a Service or not does not exhaust the ethical issues of web applications. We still need the Franklin Street Declaration and AGPL-licenced software. What Stallman’s essay adds to this is insight into how what we do online affects our freedom to use software, strong guidelines for how to protect that freedom, and possible future directions for people writing software that respects users’ freedom.